I know you’ve heard it said: “They’re all bums and liars; we should vote them all out.”

The premise seems to be, if only we got rid of this bunch of scoundrels, their replacements would be upstanding, dedicated civil servants working tirelessly for the public good.  What a breath of fresh air for the nation.

Nice try.

Even if we Americans were able to take concerted action, we would no sooner “vote them all out” (as this website advocates) than the supposed bums and liars (whom we gladly elected the last time around!) would simply be replaced by new ones.  It is a fantasy to think otherwise.

Perhaps it is the nature of man or the constancy of the forces involved — money, power, fame, ambition —  that makes otherwise earnest men and women turn into shills for their party bosses.  The inevitable result: you stop listening to what these people say, because they simply echo the talking points distributed that morning from party headquarters.

Congressmen and Congresswomen will never, never, on their own, initiate a Constitutional amendment that would limit the length of their own terms and serve to check their power.  So the only practical way to create the upheaval that “voting them all out” purports to achieve is the State Two-Step: state conventions propose congressional term limits, and then three-fourths of the state legislatures agree to ratify them.

I am attending the TEDx event in Asheville this weekend.  TEDx is all about change, about “ideas worth spreading,” as they put it.  Someone needs to grab this idea and spread it, because otherwise it ain’t happening.